You can see Korea and Japan for an example of how “painless” it is.
No one in this thread is talking about the desirability of killing people off. We are taking about how to maintain our current population, or whether it’s actually catastrophic if the population starts to decline due to people dying of old age faster than babies replace them.
If the world fecundity of humans really does drop below replacement levels (and we’re not there, yet) then yes, you and i will be among those 5 billion who disappear. At exactly the same age we’d disappear if fecundity were slightly higher. Really not seeing a problem with that.
I hope we can decline slowly, with enough time to work out the issues. But I’m definitely in the camp that thinks a couple billion humans would be enough.
Statistics: “Tokyo’s population within the city proper (Tokyo Metropolis) is around 14 million people, while the Greater Tokyo Area, encompassing Tokyo and surrounding prefectures, has a population of approximately 37.2 million.”
I’m sure commuting back and forth to work every day is much more pleasurable. LOL
As exemplified by Japan and Korea, you don’t need the whole world to be on a catastrophic decline to have a problem; you can have regions with catastrophic decline leading to disaster, while other regions are growing.
I’m glad you find it funny, but I’m less concerned with the people commuting to work than the elderly people who lack caretakers.
Korea looks to be in trouble. I’m not certain Japan is. And as I’ve said above, i think the US has a decent shot of managing a very gentle population decline if we just loosen up immigration rules. (And hopefully, Japan will solve some of the practical problems of sustained population decline and we can just copy them.)
I’m not understanding this. What has that to do with the fact that worldwide population numbers are very high? Non sequitur.
For much of human history, children had to start being economically productive by age 8 or so, because society can only support so many non-productive citizens. And most people worked until they died.
We currently only require active economic participate from ~20-65.
There’s a lot ways we can manage an older population.
What makes you think immigrants are going to want to come here to - what, feed an aging population of Americans as they die off? WTF?
People immigrate to places where there is economic opportunity. If our native population is aging off and dying, what “pull” are we going to have? It doesn’t make any sense.
This sounds even worse. “Hopefully we can see how Japan makes people comfortable while their country falls apart and follow suit” is not appealing at all.
What are you talking about? This was regarding Japan and Korea, not worldwide population numbers. Talk about non sequiturs…
Bingo! In agrarian or even industrial cultures, “more was better” in terms of family size. Joe could tend to the cattle and chickens while Henry and Frank helped dad in the fields, etc. In our culture, “more is way more expensive” in terms of the amount of money it takes to properly raise and care for a child to the age of 18.
I just looked up these stats: “Raising a child to age 18 in the US currently costs an estimated $310,605, according to the Brookings Institution, which includes expenses like housing, food, childcare, and education.”
I don’t know how close that is to reality, and I’m sure that it varies from region to region and family to family, but I think most parents would agree that the cost is high.
I understand that there are practical issues providing care to the elderly while also running a vibrant economy. I don’t think that population decline means the economy sucks, though. I think that’s quite a jump, actually.
If birthrates remain below replacement levels, there will be no “dying off of older generations and then things will be manageable” period. The pyramid will continue to be inverted and the eldercare problems will continue.
Those problems can be ameliorated with smart immigration policies but it will probably require an epidemic of having no care workers available for night shifts before a certain segment of the electorate will come around on immigration reform.
Still, I have slightly more confidence (but not a lot!) in our ability to manage a declining population than I do in our ability to stop destroying the planet with our careless billions.
Really? Then can you provide some examples of countries whose economy prospered while their population shrank?
Japan’s population has been declining for more than a decade. They may be heading into troubles down the line, but right now, it’s a pretty nice place to live.
Ultimately “feed an aging population” = “have a good job”.
We wouldn’t need immigrants to live in the basement of old folks homes and spoon farina into their wrinkled mouths. We need them to fill important jobs in the economy, to work on farms, drive trucks, run businesses, keep factories and facilities running. To do the jobs there simply aren’t enough native born Americans in existence to do.
That isn’t a bad thing, it’s a very very good thing, it’s opportunity.
Except that whatever new place is experiencing a boom - Nigeria, if current population statistics hold - is going to have way more opportunities. You know, by virtue of the fact that they’d be a massively populated and productive country. While we have some old people who were productive, decades ago.
Thanks for making my point for me. Go look at a graph of Japan’s GDP per capita. Post WW2 to the late 90s, massive growth. Then, stagnation, and yoyoing around a baseline that hasn’t gone up anymore.
Go read Rising Sun by Michael Crichton. It was written during the tail end of the Japanese boom, and Crichton basically assumed that in the near future Japanese companies would take over the United States by simply being a zillion times richer. Even when I read it as a teenager in the late 2000s, it was delightfully anachronistic.
(If you’ve played Cyberpunk 2077 that’s also why Japanese companies like Arasaka basically rule Night City. When the Cyberpunk IP was put together, Japan looked like the future).
Guess what happened? Japan’s population stagnated, and the economy with it.
Yeah, they’ve been riding the crest of the wave for a while - but now the people who should have been born at the end of the boom are failing to enter the workforce, and the economy is basically Wile E Coyote running over thin air.
This is the key point, by the way. When population drops, obviously GDP will drop; you have less people doing less stuff so you’re overall less productive. But maybe that’s OK; you also have less you need to get done as a country, because you have fewer citizens to care for. So maybe it all works out?
But it doesn’t. Because even though Japan is a leader in automation, even though they are aware of their declining population and are working to mitigate it, their economy is shrinking per person.
Of course, because you also have more older, non-productive people (strictly from a work perspective, not meant to malign old people)
It’s one of the shortsighted elements of the anti-immigration policies of MAGA.